This article contributes to our empirical understanding of self-respect in risingmeritocracies by focusing on the experiences of unemployed, low-skilled people recruited as workfare volunteers in the Netherlands. As many theorists have argued, the longterm unemployed struggle to maintain self-esteem. We found that workfare projects that introduce them to voluntary work can help them regain self-respect through four types of emotional labour: feeling respected through their newfound status, enjoying a craft, being able to perform in less stressful working environments, and taking pride in the meaning bestowed by voluntary work. But the emotional labour necessary to experience their situation more positively also increases the risk of experiencing negative emotions, thereby posing new threats to the fragile self-respect of unemployed citizens.
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Although lifetime employment was once commonplace, the situation has changed dramatically over the last century. The group of precarious workers has increased, and with it, the size of the precariat. Although there is a body of research on how precarious workers perceive the effect of their precarity on their social, psychological, and economic well-being, there is no research on the needs of precarious workers. In this article, we report the findings of an exploratory study about precarious worker’s needs. The findings show that the precariat has a diversity of needs, ranging from the need for a higher income to the need for a change in the discourse on self-reliance. Most of the needs are targeted toward the government and are not only related to labor. This is, however, contradictory to the ideology of downsizing the welfare state, in which governments focus on creating more temporary or steppingstone jobs. The needs show that the measures orientated toward the labor market are insufficient because they meet only a marginal part of the needs of the precariat.
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As a practitioner, a manager and a scientist in social work for 40 years, I am still intrigued by the social work positioning and legitimating processes. Its recognition by users and financiers is often diffuse and its fragmentation sometimes hinders effective interventions. In social work itself, we see a range of positioning processes, most of them either legitimating social work as a promoter of social justice, a supporter of emancipation and anti-oppressive practice, or positioning social work as a therapeutic approach, treating people with socio-psychological and psychiatric disorders. Social work is often promoted as a ‘real’ profession, in need of formal recognition and in need of a precise profile. In this article it will be argued that the core of social work is about supporting people in their social functioning and should position itself in the centre of the post-modern quest: the social-psychological disorientation, the lack of meaning, and the problems of isolation and exclusion. Modern professionalism is not about demarcating and regulating but much more about ‘Entgrenzung’ and openness.
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